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Many apologies to my readers for going awol. Blog posts “should be” released in a consistent pattern, say online media experts. But my heart has not been in it these days. I don’t know if anyone else has gone through this, but I’ve been absolutely crushed by the mass murder in Newtown. I’ve started on a dozen blog posts, but they all seemed too trite to finish. And maybe this one is, too.

Maybe it was these four characters hunched around the flame that got me working again

The text on the left of the photo above says “In this house we do real, we do mistakes, we do real loud, we do second chances”, a remix of the many “In This House” declarations out there, custom-made by my daughter for our family. That’s when I took up my camera again – to find some solace in the beauty of the world, and, perhaps to share it. Picasso, as I recently read in Brain Pickings, said that the “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”

I’d been waiting for something exciting to happen at this streetcar stop for a long time. Yesterday, the blizzard provided it.

Another famous artist, the anonymous “Anonymous”, said “The Show Must Go On”, the mission statement of all dramatists, actors, entertainers and fools. And the fool, as Shakespeare wrote, over and over again, is wiser than the judge, for he realizes that the best he can do is to share his gift. We hear of athletes playing through injury, the actor playing through heart ache, and the writer writing to exorcise ghosts. Luckily, as I go on, my mandate as an artist, and the love around me, are thawing my creative juices.

This is part of one of my more obsessive projects: Unearthing the world inside women